


in this change sought our bliss

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:41:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean gives Sam something he's made. Sam gives Dean something he's kept for a long time.</p>
<p>Warning for mention of past suicide attempt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in this change sought our bliss

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sir Philip Sidney: "For as from me on him his hurt did light,/So still methought in me his hurt did smart:/Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,/My true love hath my heart and I have his."

Sam kept an academic planner, every year from when he was eleven to when the last one burned in Palo Alto. He liked working backwards through the pages before the due date to set his goal for each stage, breaking projects into parts, counting down to a completed task. 

In high school he’d tried for more precision, invented rough algorithms for how long he’d likely be at a given school. He had to take into account the difficulty of the hunt and when the last batch of credit cards had arrived and the time of year. There was always the week from October into November when Dad would obsess over maps and charts and crumbling books and then be gone one morning, returning days later defeated, hung over, inert. Sam almost always got all of November in one place, before Dad picked up a new, casual hunt and moved on.

So you wouldn’t think Sam was a master of procrastination. He handed things in weeks ahead sometimes, things he’d never get back. But he’d carried the letter from Stanford for three months before he finally put the match to that fuse. And the small, heavy lump of the amulet has been in his pocket for so long that generations of jeans have gone from stiff and new to a faded, fraying spot over his right thigh, where the sharp little horns wear at the fabric. Without the small, distinctive discomfort of it he feels naked, like when he’s not wearing his glasses.

“Did he have a good night?” he asks the nurse at the duty station on Dean’s floor.

“Slept like a baby, hon,” she says. Which means Dean was faking when she checked on him. Sam hopes Dean isn’t backsliding. There’s a lot of things like to trawl hospitals, things that are drawn to desperation or to the twilight between life and death or just to discarded flesh. Taking up hunting again when he’s got two cracked vertebrae and a fractured leg would be very Dean. 

Dean’s up already, sitting by the window with his wheelchair angled so he can look out without turning his head in the neck brace. He’s worked a pencil under the cast on his leg and he’s scratching with orgasmic grunts of pleasure.

“Stop that,” says Sam, taking away the pencil.

“You just don’t want me to be happy,” says Dean.

“I hunt down your joy,” Sam agrees. “Then I salt and burn it.”

He hooks a finger under the edge of the cast and scratches a little, then slides his hand over Dean’s thigh and cups his dick through the thin hospital pants. Dean sighs appreciatively. There’s a brisk scuff of rubber soled shoes in the hall and Sam snatches his hand away.

“They still saying you can come home next week?” he asks. There’s going to be convalescence and PT and a lot of careful sex. Careful sex is a hundred percent better than no sex.

“Dr. Ghupta says so,” says Dean. “You ready to take over on the sponge baths?” He waggles his eyebrows. 

“Mmmm,” says Sam. He leans in for a kiss, hands on either side of Dean’s face to supplement the brace. Dean can’t angle his head but he makes up for it with plenty of athletic tongue. Sam’s panting a little by the time he pulls away.

“I should get to work,” he says. “Someone’s got to do the breadwinning while you park your lazy ass in that chair.”

“Hang on just a second,” says Dean. “Got something for you.” He wheels over to the bedstand, takes out something pink, hands it to Sam. It’s a construction paper heart. 

“You made me a Valentine?” says Sam. He supposes he should be grateful Dean didn’t somehow wheel himself all the way to the morgue for an actual heart.

“Broke into the activity room on Pediatrics last night,” says Dean. 

“Wow, Dean, that’s . . .” kind of creepy, actually. But Dean is looking at the pink heart in Sam’s hands with unconcealed pride. SAMMY sprawls across it in glitter-crusted glue. There are pictures of pie and a little stick-figure drawing of stick Sam fucking stick Dean over a stick kitchen table. The stick pan on the stove sending up dark curls of smoke is a nice touch. So is the tiny blob of glitter on the end of stick Dean’s remarkably long stick dick. 

Sam is absolutely not touched. He’s maybe got a bit of glitter in his eye, that’s all. 

“I didn’t get you anything,” he says. He should at least have brought Dean some syrupy drink he would have hated. Dean’s opening his mouth to say it’s OK, Sam doesn’t need to give him anything in return for picking hospital locks from a wheelchair to draw Sam stick porn. Or, you know, for the other stuff Dean does.

“Wait,” says Sam. He digs into his pocket, fingers brushing warm metal, tangling in the old leather cord. He pulls it out, puts it in Dean’s hand. “Here,” he says. 

Dean stares at it. 

“Sam,” he says. He rubs his thumb over the little bronze face. “Where’d you get this?” His voice is flat and unreadable and Sam’s heart stutters in his chest.

“I’ve, uh, I’ve had it all along,” he says. 

Eleven years, minus the time it had spent in a drawer in the Campbell compound. _Useless mystic artifact crap. Didn’t do what it said on the tin. Might as well toss it._ he’d said to Christian, and Christian had dropped it in a drawer full of junk. Sam had driven out to retrieve it three years later, a day there, a day back. Flight or desperate prayer, he didn’t know which, Dean comatose in a hospital bed a hundred, three hundred, four hundred miles behind him. Alcohol and pills. The doctors said he might wake up. Might. Lucifer had ridden in shotgun the whole time, jabbering like the radio. 

Maybe it had worked. Dean woke up. But Sam hadn’t given it back, not then. He’d been too fucking furious. He’s held onto it till now. Till some text-messaging teen in Daddy’s SUV nearly did what Lilith and Leviathans and booze and despair couldn’t do, took Dean away. 

Dean’s hand closes round the amulet.

“Thanks,” he says. “Thanks, Sammy.” His voice is husky. He clears his throat. “Of course, you would give it back after all this time just when I’ve got a fucking neckbrace,” he says. “Just to make the porn-drawn-with-my-own-hands heart I got you look inadequate.”

_You got me out of the Cage. You got me a house. You got sober. You got out of hunting. You didn’t get yourself killed._ So often Dean refuses to think in denominations smaller than his life. But he’d broken it down into daily payments when Sam asked him to, mapped out in some giant life planner, days and months and years of sticking around. Sam doesn’t take lump payments and blazes of glory. He’s pretty adamant about that. Construction paper hearts with hand-drawn stick porn, those he'll take.

“Dude,” he says, “You got me glitter. You drew me your glitter dick. I think you win.”

Dean eyes the card.

“Gimme that for a minute,” he says. 

Sam hands it over. Dean nabs the pencil Sam stuck in his shirt pocket and holds the paper against the wall at eye-level. In a few messy strokes he draws in a loop of cord around stick Dean’s neck, a heavy pendant swinging in front of where his stick heart would be.


End file.
